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This morning, looking for an open branch of the Public Library (I need a quiet space to get stuff done), while also glancing up at the Empire State building, the flags on Fifth Avenue, and the lions of the main library, I fell. It’s not the first time that I have fallen in a city. Curbs and uneven slabs are dangerous for people who think and look in terms of photo angles.

My camera shattered and helpful Australians who had gathered to assist felt badly for me. I felt badly for me as well. My knee is just recovering from last week’s biking tumble. I’m feeling bruised.

As it happens, just this morning, I was thinking about taking care. I do know that I can be both over-attentive and under-attentive, all in one breath. At the b&b breakfast table another group of Australians was asking about safety. I mentioned always feeling safe in New York, even in days when I was in college, riding subways to and from work after midnight. Our b&b landlady confirmed that even in this still poor neighborhood of Brooklyn, she, too, feels perfectly safe. But really, her word is suspect given that she is going to Afghanistan next week to do a story on orphans, and this is not her first and only visit there, and my word is suspect because I also can be not careful enough. For example when mounting a curb on 4oth and Fifth.

Of course, people usually fear other people rather than their own lapses in judgment. The Australians were especially surprised and disturbed when they learned that nearly anyone can purchase a gun in this country. They probably weren't really worrying about tripping on sidewalks. Maybe they are better at navigating uneven terrain than I am



Today, Ed is again conferring with lawyers. We were late for his meetings because there was traffic down below, in the tunnels of the NY subway. The train paused numerous times and I remembered that feeling of irritation that comes to you in New York as you stand still waiting for others to move so that you, too, can get ahead in life. And in traffic.


Yesterday (Sunday), I dragged Ed through Manhattan once more. I proposed several escapes from the city, but he was nice enough to say it really did not matter where we went and I believed him. He has given up on the city and his radius of intolerance extends so far that any quick journey out of the center will do nothing to calm him.


In my youth, I had always hated Sundays in New York. It always felt empty and ugly then. But now, tourists and an influx of young families have given new life to the city on week-ends. As we made our way again to Central Park, we encountered any number of good people watching opportunities.



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But you can’t just hide in the park for two whole days. In my opinion, it's not beautiful enough. This time the park spit us out on its southwest corner and I gave Ed the choice of staying on Broadway or heading east. He shrugged. We turned east.


The high towers here are cool to look up at. Not all are boring, or even straight.



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We find ourselves admiring these two thin buildings providing the bread to the piece of salami in between (the salami being the Russian Tea Room).



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I lay down on the sidewalk trying to get it all in, but I fail, because the lens does not permit the joining of the red awning and the blue of the sky in one shot.

At times, the stuff on the ground is equally captivating. Somewhere nearby, there had been a costume party for dogs, and this guy was being wheeled home after collecting no prize at all. Perhaps feeling disappointed with his lack of success, he is now unwilling to pilot the plane home. His owner finally gives up. He knows he is almost home, she tells me. Home is the building right next to the Mercedes Benz dealer. Yes, that’s Park Avenue for you.







We stay for a long time on 2nd avenue. No tourists walk on 2nd avenue and so it retains the aura of my childhood (helped by the fact that I lived right by it) – an empty wide street, with dozens and dozens of small neighborhood restaurants. One after another, none of them especially unusual or expensive. It’s like walking through a French city on a day where everyone has checked out with the flu or the plague or some such disease that keeps you off the streets.

Eventually I lead Ed to Tudor City. Even though it’s hard to hide entire neighborhoods in New York, few people knows about this place. It’s a bunch of blocks elevated above the rest, connected to the world with the two prongs of a U shaped street. Built in the 1920s, it was created with the hope of luring the middle class back into this part of New York. Now it faces the UN. Back then, it had the city slaughterhouses below it. The middle class can easily be bought off by decent housing.

These days, you can find quiet here. And views of the UN. And of 42nd Street below.



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Ed wants to linger, but I’m feeling cold. I’m often cold when the sun hovers just above my reach. We make our way to Grand Central where Ed proclaims that it looks the same (apparently the huge renovation efforts of the 90s do not impress him; a crowded station is a crowded station). And now I know we have done enough of Manhattan walking.

We take the train back to Brooklyn and get off (along with this well tended duo)…





…just on the other side of Brooklyn Bridge. This is the spiffy part of the borough and only the most difficult to impress (Ed, for example) would not find it charming.




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The promenade gives pretty views of the bridge and of Manhattan. It is a pleasant place to finish up the day.



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The walk back to our own neighborhood is long, but it takes us through the gentrified neighborhoods – Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope -- and I am curious to see these well treated parts of a long-ailing borough.

We pass by many pleasant looking eateries and as I had hoped, Ed is tempted. We are intrigued by a place that brags about its cupcakes and posts a news clipping proclaiming it to offer the very best piece of chocolate cake in Brooklyn.





We buy cupcakes for later and settle in for a dinner of soups and salads and sure enough, rosé wine for me and a lovely darkish beer for Ed.






So ends our week-end. Today I’ll be flying home for sure and Ed will be flying home maybe for sure, depending on what the attorneys decide. I have a busted camera and a sore knee, but I really do have to admit that on balance, I sort of like this city. I gave it some good years and it gave me back an interesting take on life. It’s like having a very witty friend who doesn’t make things easy for you but keeps you amused nonetheless. Eventually you may get tired of the strain and stress of it all, but I’m not there yet. Stumbles and falls on crooked curbs notwithstanding.

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Masha Hamilton, co-owner of the B&B where Ed and I are staying, is an accomplished novelist. And journalist. Not surprisingly, it takes us a while to leave the breakfast table. And so it isn’t until noon that we make our way toward the upper east side of Manhattan.

The goal is to go easy on the city parts and emphasize the green, the water, the walking opportunities here. In other words, to placate the guy who refuses to say one kind word about New York.

Except that it sure is more crowded than when he was a kid here.

It is that. You hear French, Italian, Russian, Polish. Tourists, in great numbers. As someone said, the weak dollar has been a boon to New York.

And so here’s our walk, with commentary.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rooftop sculpture garden. Because it’s such a good view toward the south and west.



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Inside the museum proper, Ed starts reading every bit of info plastered on the walls. I tug, he reads. We crawl toward the exit, past a photo exhibit and past the new Impressionist (and early XX century European) art rooms…



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And finally, out the door. And into the park.



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As always, it is a place of calm, even on the week-end. Ed wonders if the horse trails are still there. A well dressed man with a large shopping bag from Tiffany’s overhears and pauses to talk about the trail and whether they have closed all the stables in the park. Ed mutters that New Yorkers aren’t supposed to be friendly.

Toward Columbus Avenue, in search of food. Past Magnolia Bakery (yes, now on the upper Westside)…



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…past endless brunchy places which Ed rejects on the basis of price and pleasant ambiance. I’m thinking hungry thoughts, so we take the subway to SoHo. I am in NY, with a million places to find unusual snacks and all I can think of is that Café Café on Greene Street will probably be an okay compromise for the two of us. I’ve gone there when the chips are down before and it always seems to be okay for fussy types.



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But the blocks in SoHo are dense with crowds. And merchants. And tourists. And shoppers. And families. And the world. And so long as we’ve lost our calm, we may as well plunge all the way to complete madness and cross over Broadway toward Little Italy…



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…and Chinatown, and the markets along Canal Street …



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I ask Ed if he ever used to come down here when he was growing up. Not really. Just to get pickles over on the lower east side. Makes sense. People leave their neighborhoods mostly for food, right?

Finally I take pity and we turn toward the financial district. Surely, on a week-end, all will be quiet there.

But no! If you were a tourist, wanting to see ALL of New York, wouldn’t you go here, to Wall Street, to the Bull, you know, to take a photo of how it should be but isn’t, what with the markets collapsing?



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The sun is getting awfully close to the horizon. I think Ed is in a daze. He’s grown awfully quiet, so that even provocative things like “isn’t this great?” aren’t having much of an impact.

I suggest that now is the time for us to ride the ferry to Staten Island. Ed used to do this as a kid. We all did, but he used to do it A LOT. Back and forth, when it cost a nickel. Now it’s free. Life could not get better than this.

We walk toward the ferry just as the sun turns all those golden and orange colors near the horizon. One of those oh say can you see moments.



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At the Ferry Terminal, the crowds are huge. Of course. People do use this boat to get home. The sun blinks, shines and dips below the skyline.

The ride is beautiful.



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Not to get too immigrant-y here, but this is the way I first came to the country: through the Verrazano Narrows, before this bridge went up in 1964...



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Ahh, New York...


The return is dark and windy and we stay indoors. Ed reads the rag papers people have left behind. I watch a woman paint her nails as the ferry hums and pushes toward Battery Park.

We take the subway back to Brooklyn. Neither of us feels like hiking for food. Our hosts suggest that we get take out from Homage. It’s kind of skuzzy, but it has good food, we’re told. We pick up a bottle of rosé from a hugely secure liquor store, then some chicken salad and portabella mushroom sandwich with sweet potato fries from Homage, and make our way back to our b&b room. Ed tells me it’s one of his favorite meals. Ever.

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As always, the drive into the city blots out all that has happened in the last decades and puts me into my childhood days again. Especially as we crawl into the gut of Manhattan at 49th, near the UN, just blocks from where I lived during my first years here.

I don’t think it has the same effect on Ed. I hear him groan as we move in that incremental way one moves from east to west here. Let’s get out and walk, he says. We do. An overnight bag rolling behind us, backpacks in place – we look weird, but, as always in this city, not weird enough to stand out.

I remember three years ago, during my routine trips here, I’d walk the streets at midnight, often in great distress, often sobbing actually, at the enormity of life and the difficulty of finding a good way to move forward and I did not stand out then either. New York is a city that pretends that eccentric is normal so that it can turn away and ignore all that should not be ignored.

It’s a gorgeous, albeit crispy cool day. It makes the city look clean and fresh, especially if you look up toward that patch of blue.



Rockefeller Center
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I leave Ed and the suitcase to the vultures of law and set out to meet a family friend (Martha) back at the UN. It’s a rare chance for me to get back inside and look around. I used to have a pass, but security measures have tightened so much over the years that our permanent passes became worthless and we, once children of the UN, have become part of the crowd again. Outsiders.



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Did you notice there are no children at all visiting the UN? Martha asks me. No school groups. No children. They’re not allowed. The building is not up to code.

It’s one of the reasons why I am here: come spring, the UN is going to be gutted and rebuilt from the inside. For the next four or five years, it will be closed, under construction. And once it reopens, all the remaining people that I still know and could ask to let me inside, will have retired.

We stroll now past the big rooms – the Security Council, the General Assembly.



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head of the Polish delegation ?


And the delegates’s lounge, where you can get your espresso fix.





My father, after his stint as head of the Polish delegation, returned later to the UN as USG. Two ends of a career in diplomacy: the first trip was so brilliantly optimistic and exciting. The second – so different! The family’s grown and gone, the wife’s tired of diplomatic functions, the future is uncertain.

My parents broke up after his final years at the UN. He went back to Poland, she stayed behind. As I walk now with Martha, I remember these spaces as ones I walked through on my own. It had been my father’s world, but I knew it best as a place where I hung out in the company of no one.



from inside the glass tower of the Secretariat
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looking out from the UN cafeteria
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Out on the streets again, I move rapidly to reconnect with Ed. And now I am in his world. From the midtown law firm, we walk to Union Square, with suitcase, backpacks, my cameras, all of it. Hobos in black and blue, past the shadowed streets of a city rushing to call it quits for the week.



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We spend some time with his cousin. Ed has family business stuff to talk over and I listen to them speak in that familiar way that you have toward those you needn’t pretend anything anymore. You’ve been through it all, childhood, bar mitzvahs, funerals, and now you talk in short cuts, with references to facts and faces that are understood.

And then I am tired. It’s evening and I do not want to go to the free MoMA exhibits. I want to go to Brooklyn, leave our bags and find dinner.

I know very little of Brooklyn. I used to go swimming at St. George hotel somewhere in this borough, because they had a pool open to the public. End of Brooklyn experience.

Now we are in a neighborhood that is very much as it may have been forty years ago.



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Except for the occasional brownstone that is being renovated (for example, our B&B on Sterling Place)...





... it is still a place for people who are just hanging in there. A place where meats are roasted outside a grocer's and people hang out casually, in pairs or small groups.



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Our hosts recommend Cheryl’s soul food and it is a good choice, even though I think it says something about Brooklyn that we should be in a basically Black neighborhood, with African American restauranteurs, serving food to mostly White people. Distinctly New York types. A family with a son who reads during the entire meal. Grandparents with a college kid who brags about her ambitions all evening long. Three couples who call themselves troublemakers, sending back the by-the-glass wine, complaining of too much spice in it. Who sends back house wine?

At the b&b, I struggle with the Internet, but not for long. I have never known the night life of New York, not the part that continues past midnight. And I wont know it this time. And that’s a good thing. New York was at its best for me when I was a kid. That’s the part that’s pleasurable now as well. The bars, the nightclubs—that’s someone else’s New York, not mine.

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Such a challenging place! I think I would be slightly more at peace with its peculiarities if the b&b Ed and I are in had reliable internet. In the absence of that, we are left to muse (gripe?) about what it is that we do and don't like about the city.

I'll get back to that topic, for sure. For now, enjoy, as I did, the approach to the New York on a bright bright autumn day.



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maybe not the big red apple, more like the red spicy pepper of my life

Everyone has an opinion about New York. The French love it. Midwesterners think it’s stuck up and full of itself but fun to visit anyway. Asians flock to it. No one can quite ignore it.

For me, New York is like a recurring dream. It keeps coming back to haunt me as a place that changes my life. Again and again. Sometimes in good ways, and sometimes not so much.

I moved there when I was seven, stayed six years, returned when I was a young adult, stayed three years and then left for good. I returned for visits thereafter, but they were short visits. Inconsequential, really. Until just a handful of years ago, when I returned to visit my now ex, who was spending the year there. One of my last trips to Manhattan ever was to see him. It was, sadly, the last time that we still felt married.


So tomorrow I’m heading to New York. Ed has legal matters to attend to, and I seized the chance to travel there with him. I want to experience a neutral New York. One that doesn’t rock my life any. Ed hates the city with a passion (like a true New Yorker that he is, he’s incapable of feeling merely indifferent about the place) and so I’m thinking we’ll have a fine old time. I’m not looking to eat well, to shop, to see the sights. The trip is a return of two aging former New Yorkers who see it as a place where they grew up, for better or worse.

That’s tomorrow. Today, I worked. In downtimes, I played around with the stitches in my mouth. Discreetly. And watched students kiss the soil out on Bacom Hill. Or something.

altered states

Well, it had to come out (the part of the tooth that chose to remain, nestled snuggly somewhere below the surface).

I remember loving my oral surgeon last year (call him Dr. Handsome, though this is not his name) and so I chose him for today’s visit as well. At the rate of a tooth out per year, my mouthful should hold me through until I’m almost eighty. Dr. Handsome will be there to pluck them out and all will be jolly.

That is, with the help of nitrous oxide.

Perhaps meditation relaxes the soul even more effectively, but I’m not hoping for a spiritual mending. I just want a nice state of dulled senses for a while. Breathe in, close the eyes, ahhhh….

The nurse sighs wistfully. Sometimes I wish we could take a chunk of this home with us for the evening, she tells me.

Do you know what it’s like? I ask it in a whisper. At least I think I am whispering. What do I know. Senses fully dulled.

Yes, my dentist gave it to us always when we came in for visits as kids.

Nice dentist. My childhood dentist was Dr. Heinz of New York. Once he looked into my seven year old mouth (I first moved to New York then) he never let go. I was his most reliable source of income for years. He’d get his face very very close to mine and stare into my mouth through little telescopes attached to his nose. He never asked me how school was going or if I was going to school at all, or if I liked dogs, or New York or summer by the sea. He was not even close to handsome.

I sat for a long time in Dr. Handsome’s office today, breathing steadily and feeling swell. I wondered if people who did drugs felt this calm. Of course, I know a little about smoking pot. I went to college on the Columbia campus of the early 70s for God’s sake. You go to a party and you see handmade cigarettes and you know they’re there to produce some altered state of being. Still, fresh off the boat from Poland (a plane, really, but who’s counting), I was too terrified of American drugs to experiment. Had there been someone schooled in the medical sciences standing nearby by (like Dr. Handsome this afternoon), I might have said sure, create visions of loveliness in my head for five minutes, no more, so I can see what the fuss is about. But the people around me where so far gone that I felt strangely alone, there with my glass of cheap Chablis. Almaden. From a round jug. Anyway, someone had to stay sane and keep windows closed up in the apartments of Morningside Heights. The temptation to prove once and for all that humans can fly seemed ever present among the smokers. At least that’s how they talked.

Once I left New York, the whole smoking pot thing faded to a distant memory. For one thing, someone finally told me that it wasn’t quite legal here. You could have fooled me. Everyone had been smoking pot on campus. These were foggy times indeed. I moved between the fog of rolled cigarettes in school and of dry martinis and scotch on the rocks back in the homes of people whose children I watched.

Oh, but what did I know about the law anyway. Laws were oddly irrelevant in Poland. A mystery for most of us. We lived by standards set by family, peers, school teachers. No one talked much about The Law. Indeed, if someone got arrested, you wondered if it was for good reasons (politics) or bad reasons (drunkenness). There seemed to be no other. Crime was rare. Even against a young girl walking alone after a high school dance, cutting through dark alleys and streets of a city whose lamps never had enough light in them to make a difference.

I thought about all this today, at least before Dr. Handsome started breaking up what was left of my tooth. Twenty four pieces later (his count), I was free to go.

And now I sit here trying to decide what I should have by my side for the debate tonight: a narcotic painkiller (strongly recommended by Dr. Handsome) or a glass of rosé. I’d go with the rosé in a beautiful glass, but I’m not sure it pairs well with thin soup or yogurt. Oh what the heck. Let’s give it a go.



Ocean author in the early 70's:
can you guess which side of the ocean?

teeth

Legislation without teeth. Political accusation without teeth. Proclamation without teeth. A former resident of postwar Poland without teeth.

I saw them all today.

Before my morning class, I was sitting in my favorite dentist’s chair asking him to please glue back a crown so that I would not look silly in class. Not so fast, he tells me. You see, you no longer have a tooth.

I have heard this before. I'm Polish and those of us who resided in Poland in the after-war years have troubled teeth. Maybe it’s all that kielbsa we put down on the dinner table. More likely it’s the absence of fluoride in the water and the utter dread everyone had of dentists who practiced the mantra of drill baby drill without much attention to issues of pain.

The interesting thing about my current state dental insurance program is that it pays for the cheap and bypasses the expensive. I left the clinic knowing that I had both lousy teeth and lousy dental insurance. Perhaps I can forgo teeth in the years ahead of me. I can see it: I become a caricature of a person, dependant on rosé wine and very soft cheese. Without the crusty bread.


In the afternoon, I take my papers to a favorite café, one that no one appears to like and so it guarantees for me the peace and quiet that I need for class preparation. I finish early, pack my papers and head back for my late class.

I cross West Washington and remembered how, four years ago, I had witnessed a demonstration here. A packed street. Tens of thousands of hopefuls, turning out for Kerry. Not that it did him any good in the final scheme of things. But the scene was like no other that I witnessed in Madison before or after.

Today, the street is golden and empty.



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I note it and keep walking toward school. But here’s a little twist to this day: on State Street, I hear the announcement: John Kerry, speaking in support of Obama on the Capitol steps NOW! I look at my watch. I have a few minutes. I turn back toward the Capitol. This is what one does in American politics, I tell myself. You listen, over and over, to people who support your candidate. Big crowds or small.




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I listen to the Obama people drown out the group of students who have a different vision for the next four years.






But still, for me, it’s all slightly bizarre. A toothless rally if you will. Kerry, who once drew crowds, now has this to deal with. Does he remember his West Washington speech, introduced by Bruce Springsteen, four years back?

I wait, but Kerry still does not show up by the time I have to head back to class. I leave the relatively small gathering and make my way to the Law School.





Do tooth fairies make the rounds only when baby teeth bite the dust? A shame.